Thursday, April 09, 2015

Just got this - pretty lame given that, well, I do not do anything related to this journal.

Dear Dr.Jonathan A Eisen,

Hope this mail brings you good health and prosperity

Fisheries and Aquaculture Journal is successfully publishing quality open access journals with the support from scientists like you. We are aware of your reputation for quality of research and trustworthiness in the field of science and thereby we request you to be an Editorial Board Member of our Fisheries and Aqua culture Journal. It would be our immense pleasure to have you as one of our editorial board member.

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Fascinating project that I actually don't think is gross in any way. From the article

Invisible You: The Human Biome will explore the community of microbes that live in and on each and every one of us. Artistic and interactive displays will show bacteria, fungi and viruses, with 11 artists commissioned to create works for the exhibition.

I want to just quote the entire story but I think that is not allowed so let's just say you really should read the whole thing and look at the gallery.

Sunday, April 05, 2015

For many reasons I have been interested for the last few years in how agricultural practices affect microbiomes. For example in regard to crops, how do farming practices affect the microbiomes of the plants, the microbiomes of the soil and area around the plants, and the microbiomes of organisms (including humans) who make use of the plants?

Anyway, the reason I am writing this now is that tomorrow I am "testifying" to a NRC Committee about this topic and some related topics. The presentation will be shown live online (register here). And I thought, in the interest of openness, I would post some of what I am thinking about here before hand.

One of the key topics for tomorrow is something I have been snooping around at for a few years - how does glyphosate (the key ingredient of RoundUp and a widely used herbicide) affect microbiomes? I am interested in this from both a scientific point of view (I think it is an interesting topic) and also from a "public policy / education" point of view. I think this is a really good topic to have a public discussion of "microbiomes" and both the importance of microbial communities and the challenges with studying them. So a few years ago I started thinking about working on this and developing a "Citizen Science" project around it. And, well, I am still working on that idea and probably will be trying to launch something in the near future. As a first start I thought it would be good to start to engage the community (researchers, teachers, the public, etc) in a discussion of this topic. So .. this is the beginning of that I guess.

Some questions I think are interesting:

Does glyphosate affect plant microbiomes?

Does glyphosate affect soil microbiomes?

Does consumption of plants treated with glyphosate affect the microbiomes of the consumer?

Directly (e.g., by glyphosate itself being in the food and directly affecting microbomes"

Indirectly (by glyphosate affecting the microbiome of the food which in turn affects the microbiome of the consumer)

If glyphosate affects any of these microbiomes above, are these significant affects (e.g., in terms of health)?

Now I am not the only person who is interested in this topic. In fact, there have been many people looking into these and related topics for years. Some of the things I have seen on this topic in the popular press and the scientific literature are, well, not good science. And some of the things I have seen are fascinating and well done.

So as a first step in looking into this, I scoured the literature for papers of interest. And that is really why I am writing this. I created an open collection of the papers I have found with the Zotero reference collection system. See this link for the collection. And if you know of any other papers truly related to this topic, please add them to the collection (learn more about Zotero here). I do not profess to know everything about this topic. But I think it is interesting and possibly important.

We all have biases and many of them are unconscious. You can discover your own biases using online social attitude tests developed by Project Implicit, a non-profit organization affiliated with Harvard University. The Gender-Science Implicit Association Test is particularly relevant here. It turns out that I have moderate bias linking science with males, as well as other biases. Knowing this fact has been extremely important. It is very difficult to alter unconscious bias, but it is easy to understand that you are biased and edit your actions accordingly. For example, if I need to make a list of potential speakers or authors quickly, the list will be of senior men from the United States. The key is to spend time EDITING the list to ensure diversity.

2. Keep track of numbers.

Most individuals in leadership positions are not seeking to exclude women or other groups from plenary talks, career opportunities, etc. Instead, they simply forget to count. They forget to keep track of gender ratio and other types of diversity. They forget to edit. When leaders/organizers have diversity in mind, diversity is relatively easy to achieve. Two examples illustrate this point: